Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, Taiwo Oyedele, has said most of the pushbacks against the proposed tax reform bills are from states that stand to benefit from the legislation.
Mr Oyedele, who stated this during an interview on Arise TV on Monday, said the committee never envisaged pushbacks from these states.
He said he had thought that pushback would come from Lagos and Rivers States, who are benefiting more from the current VAT system.
Mr Oyedele stated this while responding to a question on whether the committee engaged in adequate consultations with Northern stakeholders.
He said, “If you want to speak to finance commissioners, you go through their forum.
“And you are unlikely to find any meetings, whether of governors’ forums, the NEC, or finance commissioners, where everybody would attend.
“And I can’t recall because I don’t know all of them one to one, So I can’t tell specifically if the finance commissioner for Borno was in attendance.
“But I would imagine, because we had more engagement with boards of internal revenue service at least four sessions, he must have at least attended one of those sessions.
“And the committee that worked on these bills for over one year comprises heads of Internal revenue service from the six geopolitical zones, including our discussion where we simulated what this was supposed to mean, along with other proposals where people needed to build consensus.
“And for us, because of the data we are working with and the inequities we thought we were going to correct, we had not envisaged that this was going to be pushback from the other states; we thought the pushback would come from Lagos mostly and maybe a little from Rivers.
“It almost feels like we ended up with the people we are fighting for are now fighting us.”
